Radiation and Polarisation Performance of SADino: an Italian Aperture Array for Technological Verification Tests in Radio Astronomy

This paper focuses on SADino, an aperture array deployed at the Sardinia Radio Telescope site (San Basilio, Sardegna, Italy). SADino is a sub-array of the Sardinia Aperture Array Demonstrator, an Italian aperture array that was designed as a demonstrator of Low Frequency Aperture Array systems. The flexibility intrinsic to SADino will offer the opportunity to investigate and experimentally verify different antenna configurations and algorithms for data processing, e.g. new methods of beamforming and procedures of data calibration. In this study, the SADino performance will be investigated in terms of its radiation pattern and polarisation purity. Thanks to the possibility of re-positioning the dual-polarised antennas on the site, two different alignments of the antennas with respect to the cardinal directions have been studied. Results at 270, 345 and 420 MHz will be shown.